Apache Cordova 3.4.0 has been officially released with a range of bug fixes for its various supported platforms, which now include Firefox OS.

Cordova is an Apache Foundation open source project that consists of a set of device APIs that you can use to create mobile apps that access native device functions such as the camera from JavaScript.

Supported platforms include iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and as we recently reported, Firefox OS is a now added to the list. Adobe PhoneGap is also based on Cordova.

Alongside the JavaScript support, Cordova lets you package HTML5 apps as native apps via the framework, after which your app will be installable from the app store of supported platforms.

The full list of fixes for the various platforms can be seen in the Apache announcement. Some of the more interesting for Android include the removal of addJavascriptInterface support from all Android versions lower than 4.2 due to security vulnerabilities; and the fixing of the cordova/emulate on Windows.

For iOS, one of the more useful fixes is that large JSON payloads will now be parsed on a background thread, and will yield control when executing multiple commands is taking too long. Another nice fix means the whitelist will no longer crash when the URL path has a space.

For Windows Phone 7 and 8, createTemplates will install the theme for Visual Studio2013 as well. More importantly, Windows Phone 7 is now deprecated. The advice is that you should consider upgrading your projects to Windows Phone 8 as the team will be dropping support completely in version 3.7.0.

With the inclusion of Firefox OS Cordova now looks even more like the only sane way to build native apps that run on a range of devices. It has become the de facto standard API and displaced HTML5. All that is missing now is Chrome OS support.

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